A new novel of mine, The Ash Tree, has been published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it recounts the lives of an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family as it builds a new life in California.

There are three other novels of mine - one is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished; another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse; and Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable - is my political novella (with eight stories) from Amazon's Createspace, about Israel and its reactions to the first Iraq War in 1990 (with the fear then that Saddam Hussein's missile bombardment might contain a nuclear weapon).From a review of "Acts" on Amazon.com:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Monday, July 26, 2010

My Dinner with Andrei

Andrei Voznesensky died early this June, and his death marks the passing of a courageous, astute, and brilliantly ironic poet. His death marks, too, the ending of a cycle in Russia of humanistic struggle on his part and Pasternak’s, Yevtushenko’s, and other poets against the always eager manifestations of brutal power.

I was so moved by his poetry reading in Cleveland in 1980 that my imagination remained haunted for months afterward, and I felt compelled to write some fiction about it. The story grew beyond the specific circumstances of the reading (the passionate urgency emerging from this ironic man as he read “I Am Goya” or the irritating dead-pan of the reader of the translations), and finally the story grew to imagine ways in which an American college teacher might, too, feel haunted by his society and history; hence the story’s title: “Your Name is Hiroshima.”

In early 1985, the poet was visiting Oberlin College near Cleveland, and with a certain urgency of my own, I mailed my story to him. I did not hear from him and learned he had left Oberlin for New York. In late June, at 6 a.m., the phone rang, and I heard a clear, penetrating voice say: “This is Andrei Voznesensky. I received your story. I like it very much and not because it’s about me. I want to meet you. Let me visit this fall. I can arrange to read at your university.”

On a frigid December morning, I met him at the Cleveland airport, and we did not stop talking. He ate a lunch of lamb, salad, and good bread with my wife, Jeanette, and me in our cottage-like house in Cleveland Heights; he said it reminded him of his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow and made him homesick.

“You would like it there,” he said; “someday you must visit me.”

We spoke of Brodsky and Babel (“Do you know his great story ‘My First Fee’? You would love it.”), Rostropovich and Gorbachov, Auden and Lowell, Ginsberg and Balakian. For an afternoon party in his honor, I had invited all the usual suspects (ranging from a vice-provost to a brilliant undergraduate), but he would have none of it; he said he had come only to meet me and to read.

When I picked him up at his hotel before the reading, he asked me into his room and said he would be ready in a few minutes. He wore a fine silk robe as he finished dressing, and I was reminded of his remark that Rostropovich loved beautiful fabrics and furniture: “His home in Washington D.C., it is like a museum!” (The great Russian piano virtuoso Gilels once remarked that American supermarkets were like food museums.)

In order to promote his reading, I had pinned posters to the walls of the area’s universities, of Jewish delicatessens across the east side of Cleveland, etc. In the evening, the community of Russian Jews appeared in mass. The ballroom at the top of old Mather Mansion was filled to capacity. My introduction spoke of the Russian poet’s courage in breaking historic silences after Stalin’s death – about the Cold War, about the Holocaust – and I spoke of his poetry’s combination of wry critical intelligence and “sorrowing sympathy,” to quote Robert Lowell’s remark about him. For most of this audience, though, no introduction was necessary, and neither was the actor who read the translations (“I would have preferred you reading the translations”), for we were rapt by the power of his performance, which was only enhanced by his self-effacing ironic introductions in English.

As he read, he became his personae: Goya, then Gogol, then a witness to the killing of Jews in the nineteen forties. And we the audience became witnesses in turn; finding our ordinary preoccupations placed in stark perspective, we measured the degrees of cowardice and courage in our own lives. The applause shook the ballroom floor, as if he were one of those great Russian virtuosos, Oistrahk or Richter, who traveled here to stun America with their expressive force. No wonder he and Yevtushenko had filled stadiums in Moscow.

After the reading, he agreed to eat at a Greek restaurant; I gathered a half dozen of his most ardent listeners, and once there, we all raised our cloudy glasses of ouzo in toasts to honor Andrei. The next morning on the drive back to the airport, Voznesensky asked, “Why, Danny, why is your story not published in America?”

“It’s a strange culture here, and publishing in America is a strange business.”

“A business,” he said and then added, “It is not easy to be American writer, no?”

I could not believe it: he was speaking something like what I had invented for him to say in the story I had sent him.

“Not easy,” he repeated.

“I think it’s harder to be a Russian writer, yes?”

He smiled with his characteristic self-irony and said, “I think, yes.”

[Daniel Melnick’s story about Voznesensky can be read below, or click on the June 2010 post.]

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.